PlayMarkd

A gaming bucket list where players can easily save, organize, complete and rate the games they want to play.

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Inspiration

I’ve always loved playing games, but life can get busy. These days I don’t have much time to play, yet I still keep an eye on new releases from franchises I like and watch reviews from my favourite channels and content creators. Because of that, it’s very easy for me to forget about a game I saw somewhere a few weeks ago, and it bothers me even more when I can’t remember where I saw it. When I saw that Shipaton had a category for building a bucket list for games, I finally had the motivation I needed to build it.

What it does

The app gives you a quick and simple way to add a game you want to play to your personal backlog, organise them, keep track of whether you’ve already played them, and remember how you rated them and the notes you added.

Whenever you hear about a game you like from creators, trailers, social media, friends, articles, or gaming news, you can save it straight away. You can attach the link like a bookmark if you want, so it’s easy to remember where you found it and go back later. Or, just search by the game’s name and let the app fill in the details for you.

The quick‑fill option, which uses the IGDB API to search for and fill in game details, is restricted to five searches per user. That’s where the monetisation model comes in. After that, users can either watch an ad to search again or buy a one‑time lifetime upgrade through RevenueCat’s paywall for unlimited searches.

Target categories

  • Influencer Awards: Gaming — Mr Lewis Blogs Gaming
  • HAMM Award

How we built it

The project was also a good opportunity to try out new technology and tools I’d always wanted to use. I’ve worked as an Android and Flutter developer before, but I’d never built anything with KMP/CMP, so I chose that stack to see what the current state of it was like. It was a pleasant surprise to get things working on iOS so quickly using Kotlin. I still had to write some Swift, but overall I’m very happy with my choice of framework.

Design was a concern at the beginning, but the state of AI tools these days is amazing. I had a great time using Google’s Stitch to prototype some screens and get something going very quickly.

For monetisation, it was my first time integrating RevenueCat, and it was a breeze. Building the paywall was also very easy. I had many issues solved by Rico, opened one support ticket which was handled quickly, and then it was ready to go live. Admob was not very difficult to integrate either.

Overall, it was a great experience, if it wasn’t for the stores…

Challenges we ran into

It was very disappointing to have my iOS app rejected by Apple and then stalled for two weeks. The first review came back quickly with a rejection, and then it was just ignored. To this day, I don’t know why it was rejected.

Google Play took about a week for the first review, but once it started, the process was fast.

Considering those queues, if I may offer a suggestion, extending the deadline for future hackathons could be really helpful to make the event more productive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m quite happy with how quickly the app saves a game to the backlog, that was my main goal, whether via share or search. Keeping the original link lets users go back to where they saw it, and showing the thumbnail should be enough to remind them where they first discovered it.

Considering I started development a bit late in the hackathon, I’m quite proud to have an app on the stores in a little more than a month. AI certainly helped, but I still had to steer it a lot to get things done properly.

I also had to learn a lot about video editing to create the demo. I’m quite happy with the result, even if it looks quite simple.

What we learned

I learned so much from this project, mainly about the life of an indie developer. I expected to learn from my technical stack, but the real learning came from the business side: thinking about monetisation strategies, marketing materials, and growth opportunities was invaluable. RevenueCat was also very helpful with its resources and live streams, sharing knowledge from people who have been through it.

What's next for PlayMarkd

Beg Apple for more reviews, and gauge the gaming community’s interest in the app to decide how to move forward. I’d love to add a share feature so users can share links more quickly and make the app more social, but I want to wait and see what other people have already built.

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